Mitt Romney Misses His Best Shot at Donald Trump

Donald Trump appears with Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann, at a news conference to endorse Romney’s 2012 Presidential bid.

Photograph by Ethan Miller / Getty.

No one should mistake Mitt Romney’s anti-Donald Trump speech, which he delivered at the University of Utah on Thursday, as the best shot he could have taken. It was full of invective, some of it amusing, a great deal of it justified. Looking at Trump, one does see “the bullying, the greed, the showing-off, the misogyny, the absurd third-grade theatrics,” as Romney put it. But, listening to Romney, one also hears a startling lack of self-awareness, given that Romney, more than any other single person, is accountable for Trump’s being in a position to contend seriously for the White House. In 2012, when Romney not only eagerly accepted Trump’s endorsement but brought him into his campaign—featuring him in ads, at events, in fund-raisers—he provided the bridge between the murky birtherist precincts of right-wing talk radio, where Trump had some sway, and the Republican establishment. Romney made Trump respectable—or respectable enough for a Republican debate stage. If Romney had come out and acknowledged that, and taken some of the responsibility and the blame, the moment might have provided a true turning point in the Republican Party’s fight against Trump. Instead, it looked like a mockery.

“Isn’t he a huge business success? Doesn’t he know what he’s talking about?” Romney said, anticipating objections to his broadside. “No, he isn’t. No, he doesn’t.” Where might deluded Republican primary voters have picked up such a misguided idea? Perhaps from Romney’s speech, at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, in February, 2012, in which Romney spoke of his own business record and, looking over at Trump, who was standing on the stage, said, “not quite as successful as this guy.” He added,** **“Donald Trump has shown an extraordinary ability to understand how our economy works.” Did he develop his view of the effect Trump would have on “our children and grandchildren” when Donald and Melania were hosting a birthday party for Ann Romney that doubled as a campaign fund-raiser, bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars? (Buddy Valastro, of TLC’s “Cake Boss,” made a cake with a figure of Ann and her horse Rafalca on top.) When Romney talked about Trump’s hold on the principles of conservatism, was he thinking about the robo-calls and radio ads that Trump made for Romney in 2012, in which he criticized the conservatism of Romney’s rivals? Romney put money into putting Trump on the airwaves with a political message, making Trump an authorized arbiter of his own party’s policies. Ann Romney called Trump a “wonderful” surrogate, and, when thanking him on Super Tuesday, called him an “honorary Buckeye” for being “on the radio for us all the time in Ohio.”

In Utah, Romney was forceful on the matter of Trump’s “temperament” and his “personal qualities”—and there is much appalling material there—but he also managed to make it sound like the main problem with Trump’s most bigoted policy proposals was that they lacked tact and tactics. “Mr. Trump's bombast is already alarming the allies and fuelling the enmity of our enemies. Insulting all Muslims will keep many of them from fully engaging with us in the urgent fight against ISIS,” Romney said. “And for what purpose? Muslim terrorists would only have to lie about their religion to enter the country.” Romney, who grew up in Michigan, a state with a significant Muslim population, missed the opportunity to say emphatically that many Muslims are simply Americans, not foreign allies or enemies, and that there is a principle at stake. One of the “bombshells” Romney speculated about was a tape of a Trump interview at the Times showing “that his immigration talk is just that—talk.”

Romney’s silence on his own involvement with Trump, who was then a champion of birtherism, a conspiracy theory inflected with race and fears of Muslim influence, wasn’t the only instance of historical amnesia. He began by citing, favorably, Ronald Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” speech, from 1964, in which Reagan urged voters to choose Barry Goldwater, properly seen as an extreme and erratic candidate but one who, Romney said, offered an alternative to “an oppressive government that would lead America down a darker, less free path.” (That would be Lyndon Johnson and the War on Poverty.) And what did Romney want Republican voters to do? Vote strategically. (He didn’t pretend that any of the remaining Republicans particularly inspired him.) “Given the current delegate-selection process, that means I’d vote for Marco Rubio in Florida and John Kasich in Ohio and for Ted Cruz or whichever one of the other two contenders has the best chance of beating Mr. Trump in a given state.” The great cri de coeur to take back the G.O.P. from a con man was, in effect, a plea for an open Convention. This was billed as an anti-Trump speech, but the harshest words in it weren’t directed at Trump. “A person so untrustworthy and dishonest as Hillary Clinton must not become President,” Romney said. “She compromised our national secrets”; she and Bill Clinton traded “political influence to enrich their personal finances”; and “she jettisoned her most profound beliefs to gain Presidential power.” Is that jettisoning an experience Romney remembers from his decision to embrace Trump?

"He's playing the members of the American public for suckers,” Romney said. “He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat.” When Romney tried to deploy that con man—that con—for his own ride to the White House, he didn’t even get a hat. When Romney finally did address the obvious endorsement question, in a tweet hours after his speech—“If Trump had said 4 years ago the things he says today about the KKK, Muslims, Mexicans, disabled, I would NOT have accepted his endorsement”—it was to defend, rather than to regret, the association.

Romney’s history does not disqualify him from attacking Trump, who is, indeed, a dangerous candidate. Instead, it could, with the help of a little honesty, have made his message more powerful, because Romney should understand the temptations of engaging with Trump, of coveting the political support his bigotry can garner while wanting just a little bit of cover. After all, Romney has given into that temptation. “Why did Mitt Romney BEG me for my endorsement four years ago?” Trump tweeted on Thursday. It’s a question that Romney should have attempted to answer. (Trump added, at a rally in Maine, “I could have said, ‘Mitt, drop to your knees.’ He would have dropped to his knees.”) What the Republican Party needs even more than a quick fix that might deny Trump the nomination is an ethical place from which to confront Trumpism.

Amy Davidson Sorkin is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.